Letters to the Editor
From Cruze, but by Kathleen
From Cruze, but by Kathleen Cruze’s owner, Kathleen, came into The Informer office with a hand written note. She felt that her dog had something to say about Whitianga but with his negligible capacity to express canine thoughts in English words, Kathleen has confidently done it for himFrom Cruze, but by Kathleen Cruze’s owner, Kathleen, came into The Informer office with a hand written note. She felt that her dog had something to say about Whitianga but with his negligible capacity to express canine thoughts in English words, Kathleen has confidently done it for him.
"Whitianga is paradise for me. So many great dogs here. We have lots of interaction sniffing and lots of great people here with stroking hands. I love being stroked and it happens all the time.
Best of all, my absolute favourite is the beach and it is especially special when I am there having interesting sniffing with other dogs and great stroking/patting from the great people of Whitianga.
Thanks to everybody and every dog."
From Cruze
Whitianga
Mr Thomas Everth – explain or apologize
In the latest issue (Issue 1077 24/10/23) of the Informer Mr Everth bombards the Informer’s editors with some very serious accusations.
Can Mr Everth please specify when and where the “new editors/owners of our local paper have repeatedly demonstrated that they are happy to vilify minorities to promote an oppressive form of ‘normality’”?
In fact, the editors of our Informer have proven to be very open minded or else they would not have published Mr Everth’s pointless ramble about … what exactly?
The Informer is one of the few newspapers that is blissfully decoupled from the obligatory drift towards culture wars and identity politics that all our mainstream media have subscribed to as a condition for receiving money from the 55 million ‘NZ on Air’s Public Interest Fund’[1].
And this is -one of the reasons - why we love our local paper.
Elisabeth Resl
Kuaotunu
Puzzles Please!
There are the two types of puzzlers. The ones who prefer puzzles with letters (Crosswords, word search, etc) and those who prefer those with numbers (Sudoku, number crunch, etc). Being a lover of numbers I am saddened to see only word puzzles in The Informer this week. Maybe you can get the “Portal Man’ to write about society’s bias against the mathematical minority, this would give him something worthy to write about. Please include a Sudoku alongside the standard crossword in every issue.
BTW: Love your paper, keep it up.
Let me finish by saying there are three types of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who cannot!
Regards.
Mark Antony
Bushmen far outrate poison
I see the conservation department and the regional council are still using 1080 poison with a drop over Whenuakite (Informer 17 Oct ’23).
DOC and council tell us that spreading 1080 baits poison is their ’safest and most effective method to control possums, rats and stoats over large areas’.
Whenuakite drop covers 1400 ha, a tiny area when you consider that one trapper is capable of controlling all these species over a 5000ha area at a fraction of the price of an aerial 1080 drop.
When using poison on your property the first internationally accepted safety factor is to contain the poison within your boundary.
DOC and council tell us that poisoned creatures may carry the poison many kilometres outside their boundary and those dead carcasses will remain lethal to scavenging birds, dogs, pigs and insects for another 6 months or more.
If a private citizen were to spread poison like this, you’d think both DOC and Council would be on their back. But no, you find that DOC and Council have actually provided the private citizen's poison and the funding for him to spread it.
I have spent some time with bushmen who make their living through trapping, and I can see how efficient their work can become after they have worked in an area for a couple of years.
What these bushmen can achieve makes a nonsense of DOC and Council's poisoning system which openly ignores basic safety practices and accepts a high level of unintentional poisoning of many native and domestic species.
John Veysey
TCDC and Mercury Bay Boating Club
Thank you to June Bennet for voicing her concerns re the “Hush Hush” transfer of the Mercury Bay Boating Clubhouse. It was mentioned to me and I discarded it as a baseless rumour? It is outside the LGOIMA dictates for a council to behave in such an undemocratic way.
For your Information - As stated in the recent Ombudsman’s Report on Councils: -
1 ‘It is important for senior council leaders to communicate clear and regular messages to staff, signalling the councils commitment to conducting business in a manner that is open, transparent, and facilitates accountability and public participation’.
2 ‘All meetings (gatherings at which elected members make decisions on behalf of their community) must be publicly notified in accordance with Section 46 of LGOIMA, and all agendas and papers must be available to any member of the public at least 2 working days before the date of that meeting’.
However, the public’s perception of Council’s decision-making processes do not appear to align with Council’s own confidence in the integrity of their processes. Many respondents to a public survey expressed concern about the reasons to exclude public from meetings, and about Council’s practices around workshops as follows: -
“Not enough debate. It all seems to have been decided beforehand. Too much public exclusion with little explanation”
“........there seems to be a disproportionate number of public excluded meetings - behind closed doors”
“I understand the need for information, sharing and discussion but feel workshops often take it beyond that and reduce the ability for the public to have input on issues until it is too late”.
We, the public, have a right to know, and a right to be involved in any decisions relating to our community. The Mercury Bay Boating Club is the long-established home of sailing for Whitianga and surrounds and is a vital part of our community. Being moved up into the estuary would be its death knell. It is blindingly obvious how dangerous it would be to suggest that kids (or anyone) could sail in the conditions that prevail there - extreme currents combined with being the main entrance and exit for both the Marina and the Waterways. I seriously doubt that TCDC could be irresponsible to that degree.
For their own benefit, as well as ours, I request that TCDC make an open, honest and transparent public statement both in the Informer and on CFM ‘asap’ to advise exactly what the proposal options are for the Mercury Bay Boating Club.
Ady Cole-Ewen
Wharekaho